I finished Slaughterhouse – Five tonight. As I mentioned yesterday, I didn’t know if Billy Pilgrim was insane, hallucinating due to his injuries, suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome or if he was truly abducted by aliens. The end of the book still leaves you wondering.
All in all, I liked the book. It’s considered an anti-war book and though you clearly see that through Billy’s experience during WWII, it really isn’t an in-your-face-anti-war book. If anything, I’d consider it an anti-death book. Nearly every page has someone dying. So it goes.
I found it interesting that near the end of the book, Vonnegut writes, “On Tralfamadore, says Billy Pilgrim, there isn’t much interest in Jesus Christ. The Earthling figure who is most engaging to the Tralfamadorian mind, he says, is Charles Darwin—who taught that those who die are meant to die, that corpses are improvements.”
I found that interesting for a couple of reasons: One, I’d just finished reading Darwin’s The Origin of Species and I don’t believe in coincidence; and two, it is a statement about today’s society: most people today prefer Darwin’s view on life, not Christ’s.
Give me Jesus any day, after all, He’s alive. Darwin is dead. So it goes.
